02/04/2009

Professor Gregor Engels of Capgemini sd&m AG and University of Paderborn, presented an overview of Quasar Enterprise, a concrete method for defining services and SOA based solutions, at the December 2008 meeting of the SOA Consortium in Santa Clara, CA.

Quasar Enterprise, based on Capgemini’s Integrated Architecture Framework (IAF), consists of five main steps, analysis of business architecture, definition of an ideal application landscape, evolution planning, integration of components in the application landscape and selection of integration platforms. Each main step is comprised of several methodical building blocks; every building block has concrete rules, patterns and reference architectures derived from real-world best practices.

During his presentation, Professor Engels focused on the business architecture and ideal application landscape steps. Using a fictional travel company example, he walked through the methodical building blocks to derive business services from business goals and then transition to software realization, including application and information services, domains, components, operations, interfaces and degrees of coupling.

Throughout his presentation, Professor Engels took questions from attendees on applying the method, including the role of business personnel in service identification, the iterative nature of Quasar, differences between functional decomposition and object-oriented design techniques, and managing business change across an evolving application landscape.

To listen to an audio recording of Professor Engels’ presentation and view the slides go here.